When I'm not traveling around speaking on building great brands, I run an advertising agency that is charged with creating and selling some of the best brand names in the world. We've worked for Discovery Channel, HBO, Sony, Miami and other wonderful companies that you've heard of. And it's our job to make sure that you not only know about our clients but that you like them and want to buy their products or services.
Believe it our not, the same techniques and proprietary protocol that we use to build brand value for large companies will also work for you and your speaking business. We call our system Brain Darts – simple, powerful messages that explain our product and resonate with our audiences.
Brain Dart brands are unique, easy to understand, often humorous and scrappy, and always created to communicate just one powerful point. Our goal is to craft umbrella brands that will stick in our audiences' brains, hammering home one simple message. If we do our job properly, we will own a little part of our target's consciousness and they will think about our message no matter what else distracts them during the day.
Simple? Hardly.
Ironically, it's much easier to create a brand message that's jammed full of information than one that's been honed to its essence. When you throw everything but the kitchen sink into your brand message, you don't need to decide what's important and you don't have to risk upsetting someone who will invariably miss whatever bit of information you chose to omit. You just put it all in. The only thing you risk missing by doing this is your consumer.
A succinct brand is much harder to create than these “kitchen sink” messages but much more successful at hitting their target. Because the message is simple, clear and powerful, it can easily imbed itself in its audience's mind. And because every little bit of the brand is strategically designed to carry out this single-minded tactic, its effectiveness doesn't suffer from distractions or extraneous information.
-Bruce Turkel